A call center is an organization of people, telecommunications equipment and management software, with the mission of efficiently handling telephone-based customer contacts. A typical call center must balance competing goals. Customers should experience high quality and consistent service as measured, for example, by how long the customer's call must wait in queue before being answered, generally measured in terms of seconds or minutes. At the same time, this service should be provided at the lowest possible cost to the call center owner.
Workforce management systems provide important tools for meeting the goals of the call center. These systems generate forecasts of call received volumes and call handling times based on historical data to determine how much staff will be needed at different times of the day and week. The systems then create schedules that match the staffing to the anticipated needs.
As methods of communications expand, however, call centers are also expected to handle various forms of multimedia contacts, such as emails, faxes, web chat, and the like. Typically, these other types of multimedia contacts allow a slower response time than calls, such as minutes, hours, days, and the like. A call center expected to handle voice calls and multimedia contacts is generally referred to as a contact center.
Forecasting when to handle the new types of multimedia contacts in the same manner as calls is not efficient. First, handling the contact immediately after it is received is not necessary for certain media. For instance, if an email arrives at midnight, it may not be necessary to have the staff available to respond immediately when a response to the email can wait until the next business day, or some other time set by the competing business goals. Second, since the contacts do not have to be handled immediately, using the forecasted number of contacts received as the basis to plan staffing levels likely results in overstaffing, and hence inefficiencies, for a large portion of the time.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a method and a system for forecasting and planning staffing levels in contact center environments.